The Posing Playwright

by David Field

  ‘No, there was no body in the carriage, Mr Blower, and you’re no longer suspected of murder. In fact, given what you told me regarding your authorisation to dump the carriage in the lake, I’m not sure that we can charge you with anything, except perhaps having a dog out of control. You’ll find Toby at the local dog pound when you’re released later this morning, although you’ll probably have to pay a nominal fee for his upkeep for the last few days. And I strongly recommend that when you get him home you keep him chained up.’

  ‘We could have had dinner in that cafe,’ Esther reminded Jack, ‘or you could have gone back to work and left me to come home on my own. Why did you want to come with me?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you where we wouldn’t be overheard.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I need your cool independent brain to think us through what we do next.’

  ‘I’m not sure what we can do, until Emily gives us that guest list. I’ll obviously be turning up to the theatre every day until she does, but what did you have in mind after that?’

  ‘Well, it may be that I’ll be taking you to meet a blackmailer.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We know that Stranmillis was paying money to a blackmailer — a man called Samuel Allen, who I visited a few days ago in the guise of the lover of the wife of a senior public figure whose husband was threatening her with divorce after he found some compromising letters in her handbag.’

  Esther giggled, then apologised, ‘I’m sorry, but you just reminded me of a funny line in Wilde’s play, which I saw them rehearsing a scene from one day. One of the heroes explains to this frosty lady that he was an orphan who’d been found, as a baby, in a handbag at Victoria Station. The lady replies “A handbag?” in this screamingly funny voice. Anyway, sorry, carry on.’

  ‘As I was endeavouring to explain,’ Jack replied grumpily, ‘I was adopting this false character in the hope of getting this Allen bloke to drop something out by accident about the extent of his blackmailing activities. At the time I was fishing for possible big names that might be at risk of disclosure by Wilde during the trial, but now I’m thinking along other lines. If Stranmillis was being blackmailed by Allen, that may be the reason why he decided to disappear, and he got his very old friend Ryan to supply the actor to impersonate him after the train left Crewe, where Stranmillis had conveniently hopped off. According to what Uncle Percy and I have learned, he was heading to Liverpool, where we think he may have been intending to jump on a boat to America. For all we know, he already did, and Uncle Percy’s up there making the necessary enquiries at a hotel where we know he was staying on the night he changed trains.’

  ‘Get to the bit where you tell me why we have to visit a blackmailer.’

  ‘Bear with me while I develop this theory,’ Jack requested, ‘since I need you to double think it with me. It may be that the reason why Stranmillis decided to make himself scarce was something to do with this argument he had with someone during Emily’s party weekend. We know that the argument wasn’t with Ryan, else she would have named him. According to her it was one of the other guests, and I’m wondering if it was this bloke Allen.’

  ‘We don’t even know that Allen was at the party,’ Esther objected.

  ‘But we will when Emily produces that seating plan, won’t we? And we’ll also have a list of other people it might have been. What I’m proposing is that we go through the list of guests and pick a name — someone very prominent in Government circles. Then we go back to Allen, and you pretend to be that man’s wife, and my lover, in the hope that Allen confirms that either he — Allen, that is, or the man whose wife you’re pretending to be — was the one who fell out with Stranmillis. My money’s on Allen, and that the row was all about Stranmillis refusing to pay any more blood money to him, and that prompted him to make it look as if he’d died or something.’

  ‘So, what’s Stranmillis’s dark secret?’

  ‘He’s unmarried, and a close friend of Oscar Wilde — close enough to finance his latest play. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve already expressed my opinion that just because a man remains unmarried does not automatically mean that he’s — well, one of “those”.’

  ‘No, but he could be, or there could be some other secret he’d want to keep hidden. Maybe something about how he made his millions, who knows? But the regular cash withdrawals from his bank account, and the fact that he had Allen’s address, all point to blackmail, given Allen’s known talents in that department.’

  ‘So Stranmillis decides that he’s paid Allen all that he intends to pay — then what?’

  ‘He tells Allen that he’s getting no more, and Allen threatens to go public on whatever he’s got on Stranmillis, so his Lordship decides to go to America, and enlists his lifelong friend Ryan in the subterfuge.’

  ‘But why not just do precisely that — go to America? Why make it look as if he’s disappeared?’

  ‘To put everyone off the scent, obviously. If it’s something really infamous, Stranmillis’s name would be all over the newspapers, and he’d be hounded wherever he went, including America. But if he stages his own disappearance, then reappears in another country using another name, he’s off the hook. We know that he hired a hotel room in Liverpool under the name of “Sir John Bunbury”, which is one of the characters from Wilde’s play, or so you told me.’

  ‘How do you account for Giles Holloway’s murder?’ Esther demanded.

  ‘I admit that’s a bit of a puzzle,’ Jack conceded, ‘but from what Emily told us it’s unlikely that her uncle Paddy Ryan had anything to do with that. It may well be that Stranmillis himself ordered that, to cut any remaining links to his disappearance.’

  ‘If so, he must have been pretty desperate,’ Esher pointed out. ‘He’s not only walking away from all his business interests, all his friends, and his entire past, but he’s prepared to commit murder to keep his disappearance ruse secret. What on earth could he have been running from?’

  ‘We might find that out when we visit Mr Allen.’

  Jack returned to his office at the Yard two hours later, to be advised that he had an urgent cable. It was from Percy, and it read: ‘I’ve located your body for this week. Join me at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘Why did you drag me all the way up here, only to tell me that I can’t even view the body?’ Jack demanded peevishly as he and Percy sat propping up the Residents’ Bar in the Adelphi Hotel. ‘And how can we be sure that it’s Stranmillis’s anyway?’

  ‘The jacket he was wearing when he went coal-mining was not only totally unsuitable for the occasion, but it had the label of his London tailor in it. That tailor’s garments are so exclusive that they actually contain a client identification number as part of the label, and a quick cable to London generated confirmation that the jacket was made for Stranmillis last November. As for not seeing the body, even the police doctor had to delay his examination for long enough to spew in a bucket at his side. Cause of death was a whack on the head, probably several weeks ago, and consistent with his Lordship’s last night having been spent here in the Adelphi, before he sallied forth onto the docks to pay in advance for what he believed would be his accommodation on a cargo freighter bound for Cork.’

  ‘The same freighter in which his body was located?’

  ‘Indeed, but travelling in the humblest of steerage berths, under fifty tons of coal in the bunker.’

  ‘So how was the body discovered?’

  ‘From its smell, apparently. It’s a long story, but two of the deckhands on the vessel were suspected of being Fenians, and had attracted the attention of our own Liverpool counterparts. They believed that the two Irish gentlemen — and I employ that term loosely — had been over here buying guns, and just before the vessel was about to cast off they jumped on board, arrested the men in question, and began a search of the vessel for the suspected
guns. They were halfway through digging down into the coal bunker — an obvious hiding place — when they were almost gassed to death by the stench of rotting flesh. The rest you can work out for yourself.’

  ‘Again, and before you buy me that second pint, what the Hell do you need me up here for?’

  ‘To be present when one of the two deckhands in question — a Mr Brady, apparently — tells us a little story in exchange for not being charged with murder, then hanged by the neck until dead. He claims that he and his chum were simply disposing of a body that had already been created, and chose the coal bunker in the belief that they’d be safely back on Irish soil before the pile got too low.’

  ‘That sounds like shit, even to me,’ Jack snorted. ‘A more likely version of events is that Stranmillis was croaked when he boarded the vessel on the twenty-third, and has lain there ever since. It’s too much of a coincidence to suggest that he was brought back, weeks later, to the very vessel that he’d been planning to board. Has the master of the vessel confirmed that Stranmillis was booked to travel to Cork with him?’

  ‘He has indeed, except he knew him as “John Bunbury”, and he claims that after his passenger paid for his fare, he left the ship to return to his hotel. But the good captain can’t explain why he didn’t cast off when he was scheduled to do, except in terms that he was awaiting a shipment of guns. He’s prepared to put up his hand for that, rather than “Accessory to Murder”, which is the alternative that I offered him.’

  ‘So if he hadn’t been greedy and waited for the guns, the idea was to heave Stranmillis over the side halfway across the Irish Sea, or perhaps into the ship’s furnace?’

  ‘Probably, but we may have to deny ourselves all the gory details if we’re to complete our part of this job we were lumbered with.’

  ‘Which is, remind me again?’

  ‘To find out who betrayed Stranmillis, and what it was that he knew that led to his untimely demise.’

  ‘Esther and I found out yesterday, from Giles Holloway’s former fiancée, that Stranmillis had an argument with someone who was also a guest at her twenty-first birthday party. We’re awaiting the guest list from that party, but my money’s on that nasty little blackmailing type Samuel Allen, whose address you saw written in that mirror. I think that Stranmillis refused to pay Allen any more, Allen threatened to expose his guilty secret, and his Lordship chose to leave the country.’

  ‘As, in the event, he did, but in a different manner to the one he intended,’ Percy pointed out. ‘But if he was leaving town solely in order to preserve himself from a red face, why was he killed?’

  ‘Because his exposure would result in the exposure of someone else?’

  ‘But think about it,’ Percy countered. ‘If Stranmillis’s secret was also someone else’s secret, then that someone else had an interest in ensuring that Stranmillis made an effective disappearance.’

  ‘What more permanent and effective disappearance can you imagine than death?’ Jack replied. ‘Or could it be the case that there was only one person with the secret, and it wasn’t Stranmillis? If our dearly departed peer of the realm knew something about someone in a high place, and was blackmailing him then that someone had a perfect motive for doing him in, did they not?’

  ‘Then why was Stranmillis paying money to Allen? And why would someone offer to help him disappear, rather than simply send a couple of toughs round to his house with a meataxe?’

  ‘We don’t know what the cash withdrawals were for,’ Jack reminded him, ‘and we’ve been assuming blackmail because sodomy is all the rage this season, and Stranmillis never married. He may have been paying Allen to put the squeezers on someone else for reasons of his own. And may I suggest that his success in obtaining Government contracts has been way above the expected average? Whoever it is either got tired of it all, or panicked, or whatever, and told Stranmillis to leave town for the good of his health.’

  Percy fell silent for well over a minute as he considered what Jack was offering by way of a case theory. Finally a grin broke across his face, and he leaned forward to slap Jack on the back.

  ‘I’m proud of you, Jack my boy! Never too proud to listen to your wife when it comes to something important.’

  ‘I thought that up all by myself!’ Jack objected, ‘and we’ve no way of knowing, at this stage, how much of all that is accurate.’

  ‘Which is why tomorrow’s interview with Mr Brady is so important,’ Percy reminded him.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d be here today,’ Emily Baxter whispered as she sidled up to Esther behind a rack of stage costumes that Esther was examining for the fourth time that morning. ‘Here’s that table plan I promised you. The ink’s faded a bit in places, but you can still make out all the names.’

  ‘Did you manage to remember which one was arguing with Lord Stranmillis on the Saturday morning?’ Esther asked hopefully.

  Emily shook her head. ‘I didn’t know all of them well. Uncle Paddy used the occasion to invite people who were important to his business or personal interests, but I was able to narrow it down to three or four, and I’ve written their names down on this separate sheet. Had it been someone I knew well I would have remembered, but I’m pretty sure that it was one of those on this separate list.’

  Esther glanced at the list and realised that she at least had something to occupy her time while Jack was away in Liverpool. She could go to the reference section of the London Library in Westminster. She knew that the Library was the biggest source of reference books in London, and hopefully the names on the list she’d been given would be those of people so famous or important that she’d be able to find information on them. It was worth a try, and with Alice and her niece happily occupied for the day looking after the Enright brood, she could start right away. She thanked Emily for her assistance, and lost no time in taking the short bus journey from Victoria to Westminster.

  By the time she was obliged to leave the tiny enclave near the front window where she’d spent three hours reading about important people in a series of books supplied to her, along with paper and pens, by a librarian who had hopes of inviting her out to supper, Esther had the basic information she had been seeking on all but one of the men named by Emily as having been the one with whom Lord Stranmillis had been arguing on her birthday weekend. Now she would have to await Jack’s return before they could progress the matter any further.

  Percy Enright glared across the table at the burly deckhand with the scared eyes as he launched into his best threatening manner with Jack seated to his right.

  ‘Right, Mr Brady,’ Percy announced, ‘this had better be good. From where I’m sitting now I can just imagine the noose tightening around your fat neck as the trapdoor drops from under you. Please convince me that you had the body of Lord Stranmillis delivered to you, rather than having to go to the trouble of creating it yourself.’

  Brady swallowed hard, and his voice was barely above a croak as he bargained for his life. ‘I have this old friend — Aiden Driscoll. Him an’ me, we grew up together in this terrible church orphanage in a place called Murragh. Sure an’ ’twas an evil place, an’ those what had the terrible misfortune ter be raised there formed blood bonds that was never meant ter be broken. Him an’ me ran away when we was thirteen, an’ we hung around the dockside in Cork until we was old enough ter take ter sea, an’ from then ’til now we bin workin’ the cargo steamers back an’ forth ter Liverpool. He was wedded ter me sister Bridey ’til she up and died from typhoid a while back, an’ he’s still me best friend.’

  ‘Very touching, Mr Brady, but get on with it,’ Percy growled.

  Brady swallowed hard again and continued, ‘Well, a few weeks back he come ter me on me boat. I was workin’ the Mary Flynn — that’s the boat that ye found the body on — while he was on its sister ship, the Connaught. He comes ter me wi’ this sad tale o’ how he was with this woman o’ no account when her husband kicked in the door, an’ there was this terrible stramash. He clattered the p
once over the noodle, an’ ’e died. So he comes ter me wi’ his face on the floor, askin’ if I could assist him in the wee matter of disposing o’ the evidence. Well, weren’t him an’ me sworn blood brothers, so me an’ Brian Kilpatrick took a leg each, while Aiden took the moothy end, an’ we heaved the maggot inter the coal bunker. It was empty then, but we was due ter take on a bunker full the next day, an’ we knew that the chancer would be buried like a hen’s egg up a duck’s arse. The Connaught was already coaled up, yer see, so ’twas better that we used the Mary Flynn. I swear by Jesus, Joseph an’ all the holy angels that I had no idea the man was top drawer, since his wife was common as peat in Mayo, or so Aiden telt me.’

  Percy frowned heavily as he replied, ‘If — and I emphasise if — your story is true, Mr Brady, then it would seem that your bosom friend Mr Driscoll sold you a packet of fairy floss. But such has been my experience of juries that I may not be the only one prepared to buy your unlikely story in exchange for an easy life, so we’ll charge you simply with interference with a corpse, and you can take whatever sentence comes your way. As for Mr Driscoll, we already have him identified as one of the local Fenian organisers, so I expect that he’ll meet the hangman long before you do.’

  ‘Was that right?’ Jack asked as Brady was led out, manacled at the wrists and ankles, but bringing down verbal blessings upon Percy and his loved ones, and a fervent hope that the patron saint of policemen would watch over him for his remaining days. ‘Is Driscoll really a local Fenian boss? If so, then Carson was correct, and Stranmillis was done in for political reasons.’

  ‘How many more conclusions are you going to jump to in this case?’ Percy treated him to a sceptical frown. ‘While it is undoubtedly the case that his Lordship departed this life at the hands of Fenians, it may have been for different reasons. The Brotherhood have been known to accept private work on the side.’